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How many live mosquitoes can fit into a syringe? 240

They may be tiny, but mosquitoes are among the world’s deadliest creatures, capable of spreading the viruses that cause Zika, yellow fever, and dengue fever. New methods of eradicating these virus-carrying insects use sterilized mosquitoes bred in labs and shipped across the globe to be released into the wild. To determine prime “packaging conditions,” researchers subjected male Aedes aegypti mosquitoes to a variety of stress tests, including compressing them in syringes of different sizes, Popular Science reports. In 1 cubic centimeter of space, 240 mosquitoes could survive for 24 hours and could even fly upon their release, the scientists report this week in the Journal of Insect Science. That’s equivalent to 1200 in a teaspoon.